Comparing the Diffusion of Online Service Recovery in Small and Large Organizations

A key concern organizations face is how to incorporate Internet tools into theirmarketing communications mix. Where and how should companies invest their human,technological, and financial resources? This paper explores a subset of this problem, onlinecomplaining and electronic customer service. It applies diffusion of innovation as a theoreticalframework to investigate organizational implementation of email technology and explain theoutcome of annual customer service surveys in 2001, 2002, and 2003. The results add to the smallbody of research on electronic service recovery by extending diffusion of innovations to emailservice recovery and underscoring the importance of adoption phases, particularly for small andmedium sized enterprises (SMEs). Larger companies provide more channels for submittingcomplaints, which represents an early phase of adoption. There was little difference in how largeand small companies respond to online complaints, a later phase of adoption.